Today, video cameras are frequently used for conducting surveillance or monitoring operations. For example, video cameras are commonplace in financial settings such as banks or casinos, where money changes hands in large amounts or at high rates of speed. Video cameras are also often used to monitor the arrival or departure of goods or services in warehouses, fulfillment centers or other like facilities, as well as the travels of persons or objects in locations such as airports, stadiums or other dense environments.
Video cameras may be aligned and configured to capture still or moving mages of actions or events within their respective fields of view, and information regarding the captured images or the actions or events may be recorded and subjected to further analysis in order to identify aspects, elements or features of the content expressed therein. When conducting surveillance or monitoring operations, video cameras may be provided alone or in groups, and programmed to recognize when an action or event has occurred, such as when a frame-to-frame analysis of video imagery suggests that a predetermined threshold has been exceeded or that a predetermined condition has been satisfied, or otherwise implies the occurrence of the action or the event based on information captured by the cameras. Moreover, information and data captured by such cameras may be archived in one or more data stores, where the information or data may be used or recalled for any purpose.
Unlike their film-based ancestors, digital cameras may capture still or moving images in the form of digital computer-based files that may be stored in one or more hard drives, servers or other non-transitory computer-readable media. While digitally stored files may be indexed, accessed or backed up with relative ease, where a large number of cameras are provided in order to monitor various aspects of a location or facility, the amount of digital storage capacity that is required in order to preserve such files for any relevant purpose may be overwhelming. For example, where a facility such as a warehouse or an airport provides a large array of digital cameras for surveillance or monitoring operations, such cameras may capture and store over a petabyte (or a million gigabytes) of video data from such cameras each day.
Moreover, existing systems and methods for archiving digital media files typically merely cause one or more digital media files to be deleted after a predetermined time, or when a capacity level of one or more data stores reaches a predetermined threshold or percentage. Such systems and methods merely treat all media files that are captured from a single imaging device, and every portion of such media files, as having equal value, despite the fact that no two digital media files are created equal from an archiving perspective.